What is Islamic history?

Thum, Rian

Abstract

Efforts to define the concepts of "Islam" and "history" have separately engendered rich debates with long intellectual genealogies. Both debates serve as a foundation for this essay's attempt to delimit the subject of "Islamic history." However, the essay also argues that a close examination of the interaction between the two categories offers its own insights. Chief among these is the argument that a reliance on subjects self-ascription as "Muslims" for definitions of "Muslim" and "Islamic" is far more than the empty or "nominal" approach that some critics have described. Rather, Islamic self-ascription is historically entangled, both an artifact of historical processes and an evocation of them, even an integral element of the phenomenon it seeks to define. The essay begins with an evaluation of the "islams not Islam" approach to defining the Islamic, rooting the argument not only in self-ascription-a common social science tool for category definition and boundary making-but also in Islamic historical traditions themselves. It then demonstrates this historical rootedness through an unusually difficult test case: Chinese-language Islams that eschewed the words "Islam" and "Muslim." After proposing a definition of "Islamic history," one that is

Citation

Thum, R. (2019). What is Islamic history?. History and Theory, 58(4), 7-19. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12133

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 24, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Dec 11, 2019
• Publication Date: Dec 11, 2019
• Deposit Date: Sep 17, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 12, 2021
• Journal: History and Theory
• Print ISSN: 0018-2656
• Electronic ISSN: 1468-2303
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 58
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 7-19
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12133
• Keywords: Philosophy; History
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2625271
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/hith.12133
• Related Public URLs: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14682303